‘Greater than ever before’: What explosion of Sussex gossip stories really means
There has been a recent surge in wild stories about the Sussexes, suggesting we’re entering an unprecedented new chapter of melodrama.
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It’s impossible to pinpoint a date or a place, but at some stage around 2019, one of the looniest, most bonkers and most pernicious stories of all time started to spread about Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
The former actress, you see, along with husband Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex had supposedly just perpetrated the biggest swindle since Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York managed to keep the Buckingham Palace backdoor key.
The tinfoil helmet brigade was, and still remains, adamant that the duchess had never been pregnant, that son Prince Archie was born via surrogate and that they had scammed the public.
To this very day, and every damn day, some new photo or clip of Meghan during her pregnancy appears on Twitter which has been slowed down and over-analysed like the HRH equivalent of the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination purporting to show that Meghan wore a moon bump.
I hope it goes entirely without saying that this is off-the-dial cockamamie; a ludicrous, virulent strain of madness.
And for years, that was it, the main horrible bit of totally truth-free gossip that dogged Meghan.
Until now.
The last month has seen a Vesuvius-like explosion in tattle about Harry and Meghan from a slew of entertainment sites, all of which have about as much factual basis as a National Enquirer report straight-faced declaring that Elvis is alive and well and running a ride-on mower franchise in Poughkeepsie.
Right now there are a number of wild stories doing the rounds about the couple – stories, it must be stressed, that are about as credible as the Q-adjacent, fruitcake belief that JFK Jr is alive and set to reappear. Any day now.
In recent days it has been claimed that Meghan is “rumoured” to have “set up shop in a hotel suite” across the road from her talent agents WME, that she and Harry are “reviewing their living options” and considering buying a place in Malibu, that California Governor Gavin Newsom “has blocked Meghan Markle on his mobile phone” and that “the Duchess’ political demands continue to fall on deaf ears” – and the question has also been raised about whether Prince William would have to bankroll the Sussexes “should Harry and Meghan return to the gilded cage”, as if that is a real possibility.
What is so interesting is not what these myriad reports are claiming, but the sudden volume of them and the frequency with which they are now popping up to rear their scurrilous heads.
So, what the dickens is going on?
Maybe the SAG-AFTRA and Writers’ Guild strikes are partially to blame. With movie and TV-making having ground to standstill, with premieres, promotional tours and starry celeb interviews all canned, there is a serious vacuum of stories to feed the entertainment machine. There are only so many pieces about the extra-curricular shagging of B-list reality TV stars that can keep people interested.
Or maybe this is a question of appetite.
Netflix and Spare basically chummed the public waters like no members of the royal family have ever, ever done before.
King Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales might have both given revelatory, highly personal interviews and the princess might have spoonfed Andrew Morton every last morsel for his book, but that was still not on quite the same scale as here.
The duke and duchess, especially with Harry & Meghan, opened up their story and their homes and exposed their children, their dogs, their friends and even family to the world to a degree that is totally unprecedented.
I wonder if an inadvertent consequence is that there is a sense of public ownership and personal investment in them that is not there with, say, the Prince and Princess of Wales.
Maybe it’s about intimacy – they took us into the most private parts of their inner worlds, their relationship and their lives, and there is now an overdeveloped but false sense of familiarity.
The last eight months especially, starting with the couple’s Netflix outpouring, have been nothing if not addictive theatre. There was no juicier storyline than Harry’s return, ever so briefly, for his father King Charles’ crowning in May and all the swirling and eddying emotional undercurrents. Talk about must watch viewing.
(It had been a good 200 years since a coronation this melodramatic. Hats off to George IV and his wife Caroline of Brunswick for that 1821 corker).
Post-coronation, the clicking, reading, scrolling public would seem to have become even more hooked on the Sussex psychodrama. After all, this soap has everything The Bold and the Beautiful and The Young and the Restless has: absent fathers, painful family rifts, finger-pointing, yelling, money, lovely clothes, very pretty women in tears and money.
However, perhaps more intriguing in all of this is what this escalation represents.
Because it would seem that Harry and Meghan have, thanks to their confessional, money-making projects, actually managed to make themselves even more into public property. Fires were stoked and fascination dialled up.
Of course, there has always been some highly speculative reporting about the royal family that is as well-sourced as a history textbook written by vile twit and political potato Ron De Santis. But, overall, the level of sensationalism that is now swirling around the Sussexes feels new and greater than ever before.
Maybe the duke and duchess will move to Malibu or maybe Meghan has taken over a hotel sub-penthouse as she tries to take control of her careening career, or maybe she, JFK Jr and Elvis will all head out for cocktails later this week.
Any minute now you’ll be able to read all about it.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as ‘Greater than ever before’: What explosion of Sussex gossip stories really means
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